QUOTE : In 1871, a visitor to the Los Angeles Public Library published an essay imagining a future in which the library would be miraculously compressed into an object the size of a suitcase. Considering how physical, how insistently tangible, libraries are—their pounds of pages and bindings, the mass and fleshy bulk of books—such a notion must have seemed as preposterous as landing on Mars. Of course, with the invention of the computer and the Internet, that is exactly what has happened. The library has a large amount of material that isn’t online, but the notion of much of it being pocket-size and contained in a small plastic box has been true for some time.